4/7 Solinger Intro and Chap 1

Reproductive capacity: sex and pregnancy, childbearing and motherhood

Reproductive politics: describes struggles over contraception, abortion, and a woman’s right to choose, etc.

It questions how power is at the heart of these debates

How and why have laws and public policy and community attitudes about sex and pregnancy changed over time?

How have these laws and policies and attitudes shapes the lives of different groips of women differently?

How reproductive politics have been key to the development of the US in the social and political relationships and the culture of this country throughout its history?

“When women have acted reproductively against laws, policies, religious dicta and community attitudes, they have violated the citadel of traditional gender roles?” (p. 12)

• What does Solinger mean when she writes that the PUBLIC has always penetrated the PRIVATE?

  • All of these things listed SHAPE the private. Are you allowed to get married? Have your children? Raise them? Like how enslaved people were not allowed to have partners and marry and have and keep their children. Native children were taken and sent to boarding schools or if the mothers were seen as unfit they were adopted out to white people.

KEY POINT: “. . . ALL THESE LAWS WOULD DEPEND ON DEFINING AND POLICING RACE BY REGULATING REPRODUCTIVE PRACTICES… RACIALIZING THE NATION.” (P. 28)

• Color and race of africans was defined as a biological marker of permanent inferiority

• There was also a biologically based interpretation of inferiority among Indians

• Domination relied on controllling reproduction

• Black women were breeders with no rights or control over bodies, sexual experiences, and children.

• 1662 relieved white masters of punishment for sexually exploiting Black women, replacing penalties with property

• 1691 intermarriage was a crime and the white person would be banished

  • Because it would defuse the idea of a superior race, the mixing of races would cause these laws to not have legs. this could lead to mixed children having rights to inherit land and name

• Mixed race children became servants, were marked as illegitimate and unable to inherit or get name from fathers

  • Threat to racial status

• Deciding who is an intimate partner was a racial privilege

  • Slaves had no right to marry

  • illegitimate children

  • womb was just a factory to create more slave children

• White women were never defined by their womb the way that Black women were.

• Reproductive health was a racial privilege.

How did “enslaved women assert ownership over bodies and reproduction”?

• herbal medicines for contraception

• infanticide

Native Americans

• Indian removals (1838-9) - death marches

• Christian missionaries defined their task as interrupting old meanings associated with communal property, clan-based power, and reframe reproduction

  • 1820 outlawed polygamy

  • Matrilineality was compromised: enforced dependency and gentility (like white women)

  • Women assaulted, diseases

  • they become on white people’s stories as promiscuous, manipulative

What does Solinger mean with “The social privileges of white people depended on laws, politics, and attitudes affirming and policing racial boundaries?”

• This means that if there were no laws and politics and social attitudes that made black/enslaved and native people inferior, then white people would not be considered a superior class of people. They would be just like everyone else and not be getting special treatment or be able to continue to glorify the white race, or further the attitudes of white supremacy.

What does Solinger mean by “Sexual privacy was a privilege of race and class?”

• Sexual privacy being a privilege of race and class meant that the act of sex, which is meant to be a private, intimate act in someone’s own personal time was brought out into the public, and up for debate. The laws and politics surrounding who was allowed to have sex and children, and when, and why, and for how long all brought to light who was allowed to keep their sexual acts private and who was up for debate. You were allowed to talk about how your p

White women had to remain chaste (no sex until marriage) because this would guarantee that they would only have sex with their husband, and guarantee that her children would remain legitimate and the inheritance would go to the “right” children. The way this was enforced was due to the laws against intermarriage, so this meant that a woman couldn’t have sex with and bear children with a nonwhite man, because she couldn’t marry him, and she had to maintain her chastity.

The creation of a white supremacist nation by controlling women’s bodies.